Abstract

During resettlement, refugee-background women often become socially and spatially immobilised with heavy domestic responsibilities, lack of language skills, and lack of access to personal transport. To empower women to navigate spatial and social dimensions of resettlement landscapes, Wellington-based non-governmental organisation ChangeMakers Refugee Forum implemented a driving initiative entitled Turning the Curve. In this article we draw upon a mixed-method evaluation of Turning the Curve to explore differences within stakeholders’ assessments of the programme’s ‘success’. Specifically, we highlight tensions around the temporalities of ‘success’; with some individuals emphasising the achievement of a license in a set timeframe, and others supporting an open-ended approach. Paying attention to these temporalities enabled us to explore relationships between citizenship practices, patience, and waiting. We argue that Turning the Curve’s curation of spatial encounters between learner drivers and driving volunteers enacts Askins’ concept of emotional citizenry, and that the programme’s disposition to patience and a quiet politics of waiting extends emotional citizenry beyond space through time. Through this disposition, more innovative forms of being together emerge and women’s rights to the city are enabled. We conclude that other resettlement efforts could learn a great deal from the emotional citizenry of Turning the Curve as a means to enhance more gender-equitable outcomes from service provision and training during refugee resettlement.

摘要

在重新安置期间，有难民背景的妇女往往因承担繁重的家务、缺乏语言技能和无法获得个人交通工具而在社会和空间上行动不便。为了使妇女能够驾驭重新安置景观的空间和社会维度，总部位于惠灵顿的非政府组织 ChangeMakers Refugee Forum 实施了一项名为Turning the Curve的推动倡议。在本文中，我们利用了转弯曲线的混合方法评估探索利益相关者对项目“成功”的评估中的差异。具体来说，我们强调围绕“成功”的时间性的紧张关系；一些人强调在规定的时间内获得许可，而另一些人则支持开放式方法。关注这些时间性使我们能够探索公民实践、耐心和等待之间的关系。我们认为，Turning the Curve 对学习驾驶员和驾驶志愿者之间空间相遇的策划制定了阿金斯的情感公民概念，并且该计划对耐心的态度和安静的等待政治通过时间将情感公民扩展到了空间之外. 通过这种安排，更多创新的共处形式出现了，女性对城市的权利也得以实现。我们得出的结论是，其他重新安置工作可以从“扭转曲线”的情绪公民身上学到很多东西，以此作为在难民重新安置期间通过服务提供和培训提高性别平等结果的一种手段。